iframe or In-Page embed

When developing enhancements for the Brightcove player you will need to decide if the code is a best fit for the iframe or In-Page embed implementation. The best practice recommendation is to build a plugin for use with an iframe implementation. The advantages of using the iframe player are:

No collisions with existing JavaScript and/or CSS

Automatically responsive

The iframe eases use in social media apps (or whenever the video will need to "travel" into other apps)

Although integrating the In-Page embed player can be more complex, there are times when you will plan your code around that implementation. To generalize, this approach is best when the containing page needs to communicate to the player. Specifically, here are some examples:

Code in the containing page needs to listen for and act on player events

The player uses styles from the containing page

The iframe will cause app logic to fail, like a redirect from the containing page

Even if your final implementation does not use the iframe code, you can still use the In-Page embed code with a plugin for your JavaScript and a separate file for your CSS. This encapsulates your logic so that you can easily use it in multiple players.

Implementation details

There is additional logic using the Player API to remove the shrink behavior while the video is playing, and then restore it again when the video is paused or ends. As created here, this sample must use the Advanced (in-page) player embed. You could create this functionality using the iframe embed code also, but the logic would be a little different and would not lend itself to being turned into a plugin.

API/Plugin resources used

Player/HTML configuration

In this example, the Brightcove Player code uses a style attribute with the width and height properties set to 100%.

Other HTML

A player wrapper <div> element is added around the player embed code to dynamically control the size of the player.

Remember to add the id attribute to the video-js tag in the player embed code.

<video-js id="myPlayerID"
...

Application flow

The basic logic behind this application is:

Define the large and small player sizes.

Add functions to make the player large or small.

Add listeners for the mouseover and mouseout events.

On mouseover, make the player large. On mouseout, make the player small. While the video is playing, keep the player large. When the video is paused or the video ends, make the player small.

Get DOM references

Get a reference to the Brightcove player and the wrapper. Define the size of the large and small players.

Change the size of the player

Find the code which is labeled:

// +++ Change the size of the player +++

Add functions to make the player large and small.

Listen for the mouseout event

Find the code which is labeled:

// +++ Listen for the mouseout event +++

Listen for the mouseout event on the playerWrapper. When the event is triggered, make the player small.

Control the player size

Find the code which is labeled:

// +++ Control the player size +++

Add logic to do the following:

Initially make the player small.

On mouseover, make the player large.

On play event, keep the player large.

On pause or ended events, make the player small.

On mouseout, make the player small.

Application styling

The CSS initially sets the playerWrapper and defines the transition between the small and large player.

Plugin code

Normally when converting the JavaScript into a Brightcove Player plugin nominal changes are needed. One required change is to replace the standard use of the ready() method with the code that defines a plugin.

Here is the very commonly used start to JavaScript code that will work with the player:

As mentioned earlier, you can see the plugin's JavaScript code in this document's corresponding GitHub repo: enlarge-player.js.

Using the plugin with a player

Once you have the plugin's CSS and JavaScript files stored in an Internet accessible location, you can use the plugin with a player. In Studio's PLAYERS module you can choose a player, then in the PLUGINS section add the URLs to the CSS and JavaScript files, and also add the Name and Options, if options are needed.

Implementation notes

If you want to be able to specify the small and large sizes of the player for each instance, you could pass those in as options to the plugin, and then modify the plugin code to read the values from the options object. See the Quick Start to Plugin Development for more detail on how to do this.

If you want to use the iframe player instead of the inpage player. The player wrapper div would surround the iframe tag, and the Javascript to manage the size of the player would be very similar to what you see here. It would need to be in the HTML page, however, rather than a player plugin.